[pointyfence]

Spotify has definitely changed how I listen to music over the years. I have my core segments, but I'd say that 33% of my time on Spotify is just stuff that I bump into for random of reasons: a music beef between artists I don't listen to, stories from friends with different tastes in music, a news article about a band in the 50s, etc.

I find myself listening to the music to give context to the stories I bump into. And then I just sort of get lost in it for a bit like you would reading random stuff on Wikipedia. Wrecks havoc on my music suggestions though.

[ehnto]

I'm similar, I spend a lot more time discovering and exploring than I do listening tonold favourites. Which is saying a lot, because I used to DJ House and DnB for a community online radio station.

[lowdose]

Isn't soundcloud better for house?

[ehnto]

Yeah lots of better places than Spotify. I only listen to house when I am mixing or listening to a friends set these days so it has to be from my own collection or theirs. It's all the other genres I listen to that are on Spotify.

[Cthulhu_]

I've tried switching to Apple Music for a little while to try and change things up, but they don't seem to have the generated playlists, recommendations and networks that Spotify seems to have. I switched back within a week or two.

I do sometimes miss my 'old' collection of music (it's still in itunes), but pretty much everything in there is found in Spotify as well (exceptions being things like early demos the artists themselves aren't proud of).

[ImaCake]

>Wrecks havoc on my music suggestions though

Netflix and spotify have definitely not solved suggestions yet. I still struggle to get either service to get me what I want.

[jillesvangurp]

With Netflix, their catalogue is small enough that I can find what I want regardless of what they suggest. They seem to have nailed the "more of the same" algorithm which is mostly looking at their weird notion of genre. For me that means it recommends me stuff I've already decided that I'm not interested in watching because they've been recommending it for months and I've declined to watch it. This seems in general a problem with recommendation algorithms: they struggle picking up on negative signals and get stuck in t a perpetual more of the same shit loop.

Spotify recommendations vary depending on the context. Their profile of me is probably very confused because I listen to a lot of different things and what I listen to is mostly dependent on context and what I'm in the mood for, which spans 5 decades of music and quite a few genres. I gravitate to a lot of alternative stuff but only the good stuff (for my personal very narrow definition of good). Spotify never figured out that sweet spot. So, I've been ignoring their radio feature because I find it a mix of "I already have that in a play list" or "I hate that song, which is why I don't have it in a playlist". It only very occasionally suggests something I haven't heard that I actually like.

However, I love their "users that listen to X also listen to Y" section. For me that's a main tool to discover new things. They also suggest adding songs to playlists. I've rediscovered a few tunes from the eighties that were somehow stuck in my head but that I struggled to name this way. The eighties were of course the glory days of the top 40 and I listened to it while doing my homework back in the day. I stopped listening to that stuff in the nineties when alternative music became a thing.

In any case, I prefer these non personalized type of suggestions over the more of the same stuff that passes for artificial intelligence peddled by many websites. I hate how you get stuck in recommendation bubbles that way. This also dominates news websites these days, which is something I hate because it's gotten quite hard to get an overview of what is happening in the world with news websites increasingly biased by what works as click bait with shoddy AI algorithms rather than telling me what is happening.

And it's a reason I like HN because here the feed is dictated by shared interest of a technical audience rather than any of our personal preferences or political opinions. That's why it works. No AI recommendations here. That's why people come here.

[fnord123]

>With Netflix, their catalogue is small enough that I can find what I want regardless of what they suggest.

How is that even possible? They barely have anything!

> Their profile of me is probably very confused because I listen to a lot of different things and what I listen to is mostly dependent on context and what I'm in the mood for, which spans 5 decades of music and quite a few genres.

This is not unique. Probably most people are like this.

If you add shared devices like Alexa into the mix then it's even more all over the place.

[derivagral]

> How is that even possible? They barely have anything!

For people like myself or my partner, this is kind of a perk. People who want Disney-style stuff have multiple platforms for it and those still exist, but the long-tail of Netflix can be great to dive into. My social bubble has gotten quite into the variety of Korean drama, including a few who'd never (normally) watch a subtitled show.